Just How Big A Portion Of The Internet Does Porn Take Up?

Porn is literally everywhere on the internet. Look no further than targeted explicit advertisements that seem to adorn what seems to be every other page, the healthy amount of X-rated content on popular video-sharing sites like Dailymotion and Metacafe, the streams of birthday suit-clad models filtering through nearly every online forum known to man. And that's not even taking into account the porn websites themselves. But how much porn does the internet actually hold? It was a question technology website ExtremeTech simply had to find out, and one that we can do nothing but share. The reality will blow you away.

ExtremeTech reports that Xvideos, the web's largest porn site, attracts a whopping 4.4 billion page views every single month and is around three times the size of the likes of CNN, twice the size of Reddit, and dwarves literally everything in its sight, apart from the “Googles and Facebooks of the internet” of course. And that's just one of countless other porn sites across the web. YouPorn, RedTube, PornHub, Tube8, LiveJasmin... The list goes on and on and on.

Through our own perusal of some of the more popular sites amongst them (strictly for research purposes of course) and a quick double-checking of the Amazon-owned Alexa toolbar – which provides information about websites, and ranks sites on traffic, visit times, pageviews etc. – we can see that Xvideos is at a global ranking of 54, taking in approximately 1.4% of global internet users every single day. The audience it attracts, meanwhile, is unlikely to surprise; swinging toward the side of childless males, aged 18-24, browsing from home, their curtains most definitely drawn.

The scale of the internet porn operation really is something else. And by that, we mean astonishing amounts of data transferred day-in, day-out. Assuming the maths is relatively accurate, an average visit of between 15 and 20 minutes on a porn site (compared to the average of three to six elsewhere on the net), streaming video at a resolution of 480x200 will result in around 100 kilabytes per second beingAudience demographics for the most popular porn site, Xvideos, is what you'd expect.

That is with one exception: who watches porn at work!? transferred, which, over the entire visit of 15 minutes is around 90Mb. Using some rudimentary estimates, ExtremeTech posits this equates to around 29 petabytes of data (29,000 terabytes) transferred every month. In Layman's terms, it's the equivalent of around 50 gigabytes making their way through the tubes every single second. “To put this in comparison,” ExtremeTech suggests, “your home internet connection is probably capable of transferring a couple of megabytes per second, which is about 25,000 times smaller. Bear in mind this is an average data rate, too: at peak time, Xvideos might burst to 1,000Gbps (1Tbps) or more. To put this in perspective, there's only about 15Tbps of connectivity between London and New York.”

When talking about the actual amount of data each site stores in terms of pornographic videos, ExtremeTech puts the figure somewhere in the region of 50 to 200 terabytes of porn, with only the likes of Google, Facebook and YouTube storing anything close to that amount of data. Taking into account the figure we drew from Alexa of 1.4% of global internet users visit Xvideos every day, and then factoring in the myriad similar porn hubs across the landscape of the world wide web, you have a truly staggering percentage of total internet traffic reserved for X-rated material. The internet really is the new home of porn, if you didn't know already. You lot disgust us.

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